"As it turns out, just a glance at pictures of two rival candidates is enough for the brain to make a pretty reliable prediction of which one will win. On average, a snapshot judgment is right about 70 percent of the time, clearly better than a coin toss. Maybe not as good as the professional political pundits, but not too shabby."

"All of this may sound ugly for the future of political discourse, if two thirds of officials are getting elected based on split-second superficialities. But the correlation in this study raises more questions than it answers about the baffling process of candidate selection. As any self-respecting psychology major can testify, the correlation between two sets of results doesn't mean one is directly responsible for the other." 11-07